Oh Defender of Diosa, Where Art Thou My Diosa?

Defender of Diosa, an iPhone app by developer Sigma Game, is a tower-defense with the best of them that offers a wealth of features and quirky artistry, but is mired with some inconsistencies and graphical glitches.

Game Overview:

The basic idea behind Defender of Diosa is a classic tale of fairy tale disaster—a beautiful goddess named Ada, who is a chicken, must be guided across the land to face her evil sister before her human existence can be restored. It’s up to you to protect her from hordes of goblin baddies as she makes her mystical hajj, with your troops comprised of archers, axe-men, healers, warriors, magicians, and assassins. In addition to each units special strengths and weaknesses, you are also given an over-arching magic spell that can be hurled at oncoming hordes to stop their advance on your poultry goddess.

In theory, Defender of Diosa iPhone app is all very grand fun, and I thoroughly enjoyed the few-against-many style of combat. I also liked the rich enhancements feature the game provides, which allows the player to trade in spoils for weapon, spell, and unit enhancements. By adding such a leveling system, the developers have created a certain amount of “oh-just-one-more” pleasantries that works wonders.

Design:

Defender of Diosa

The game suffers from a bewildering array of graphical glitches. If I were talking about a loose pixel here and there, the oversight could be forgiven, but my troops were frequently disappearing altogether behind an unforeseen wall. It’s hard to explain, but imagine you’re fighting a goblin horde when your units are unexpectedly lodged behind a missing part of the level—as if the ground is lost in space-time—rendering it impossible to see who is what or where. I noticed several jagged, unintended cuts in the menus as well, indicating a very severe rendering problem. The issue may be with my iOS version or my hardware, but at the moment, the game’s excellent gameplay was impacted. Truly, this came as an unwanted surprise, as I very much wanted to like the pulse-pounding gameplay.

The art-design in Defender of Diosa is so tasteful. Sprites have a sort of Maple Story-esque design, and the baddies are pleasantly intimidating. Levels are design aces, and even the sound effects were well-done. The developers have created an A+ effort here.

Overall Value

At an excellent price of $ .99 in the App Store, Defender of Diosa is a would-be bargain of a game, offering 70 levels with 30 more available for in-app purchase. I want to recommend this game to any fans of tower-defense, and once the graphical glitches are fixed, this could be a wonderful app offers hours upon hours of magically inspired fun.

Defender of Diosa iPhone app [ iTunes Link ] requires iOS 3.1.3 or later and is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. A small expedite fee was paid by the developer to speed up the publication of this review.